Release with Intention: Why Every Artist Needs a Strategy

How thinking long-term will build and sustain momentum

I’ve spent the majority of this week in the depths of something I thoroughly enjoy: helping artists find their strategy.

Honestly, I love it. I get excited thinking about it, writing about it and talking about it. This is the perfect combination of my skillsets firing at once - years of experience within a label, soft people skills, marketing and planning. I love that I can be an outside observer, helping artists realise their true potential by uncovering things that they haven’t thought of and often validating feelings or ideas that they already had. I joke that it’s like a light-hearted therapy session where instead of discussing years of trauma we’re having a good honest look at their career: what’s working, what’s not, and what we can do about it.

“What is a strategy?” I ask Google for the sake of this article. “A strategy is a plan or method for achieving a goal” it tells me. In the sake of working with artists, a strategy is a few more things - the vision, the story, a brand, a long-term timeline, goal-setting and a plan for execution.

The reason that a strategy is so important is that too often artists release a track, get some really great support, then lose the momentum because they haven’t planned out their 2nd, 3rd, 4th release to follow or thought about the next 12-18 months. They might go back into the studio and not release anything else for another six months. By this time fans and industry have moved onto the next shiny artist and might be less enthusiastic with someone who’s in stop-start paralysis.

On the label side it’s really compelling to work with an artist who has a plan because it shows that they have a vision. This means they take their artistry seriously and you get the sense that they’re going to do this with or without you. What a force!

Here’s a secret I’m going to let you in on. Over the last few weeks we have been pitching artists using our visual pitch deck and have had some great responses from people agreeing to support the music. Guess what? In some cases they haven’t even clicked on the listening link but they’ve agreed to support the release. Why are they doing this? Because they’re spending the majority of their time on calls and in meetings and are too busy to listen to all of the music in their inbox, it’s just not possible. But we have shown them a long-term strategy and a strong visual world and they get what we’re doing before they even listen to the music. They’re excited that we have a plan and they can support the artist across the next 12-18 months.

At Goodtwin, when we conduct a strategy session with artists we run these over 2-3 hours and really dive into the past, present and future. When it comes to forward planning these are some of the key themes that we explore.

What’s the vision?

What is the point in all of this? What gets you out of bed in the morning and makes you stay awake at night? Where do you see yourself in 1-3-5 years?

What’s the story?

People are well and truly over being marketed to, but will always be desperate for human connection in an emotional and physical way. So how are you engaging with your audience in a relatable way? What story are you telling? Who is your audience?

Cement the brand

Invest in your future just this once as an artist with a professional logo, colour palette and creative guidelines. Once you have this, you can carry this through your entire creative rollout which offers your audience brand cohesion and builds a strong visual world around your music.

A long-term timeline

Don’t get sucked into this TikTok phenomenon of “it’s just singles!”. EPs and albums still matter – you can make these big events and they’re still an incredibly important moment in an artist’s career. Every DSP and major music platform prefers to promote these big EP and album moments.

You need a timeline in place for the next 12-18 months and this will help you plot activities outside of key releases (e.g. travel, live shows, recording sessions, funding deadlines, DSP opportunities). You don’t need to be really specific either, you can be as vague as “EP 2 in Q1, 2026” but it shows the reader that you have a long-term vision.

I know you’re tempted to rush out your new release because you know it’s the best one yet, but please please please don’t rush it. Once you start you don’t want to stop so invest the time and energy in getting a long-term strategy together.

What are the goals?

Focus on goals around the next release but also across the next few years at least. Think about a North Star goal, what’s the ultimate dream?

(Btw, manifestation isn’t about trying to convince yourself you will maybe do something one day. It’s about actually believing that it will happen.)

Think about future releases, what’s important to you? Master ownership (releasing via a distributor or label services company) or money (taking a bigger budget in exchange for masters)?

The Plan of Attack

Now you have a plan, you can plan to execute and break these down into smaller steps. What needs to happen immediately (in the next week)? Next month? 3 months?

So artists and managers, if you’re reading this and you don’t yet have an 18-month plan in place, stop catapulting towards your next release and start with a strategy. The music industry prefer to invest in long-term artists so prove to them that you’re worth investing in.

Article Resources:

Visual Pitch Deck - download this template to edit and build your own creative world, use this for pitching to partners (e.g. labels, media, DSP’s, publishers).

Artist Strategy Checklist - download this document and take yourself through an in-depth strategy session, using the following list as a guide.

Please contact Goodtwin (lucie@goodtwin.ai) if we can help you with your next artist strategy session.